“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” - George W. Bush

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Obama’s Libyan adventure may have had the unintended consequence of exacerbating violence in Syria by spreading “the moral hazard of humanitarian intervention,” in which hopes for outside aid encourage risk-seeking behavior by those expecting rescue.

"When NATO started bombing Libyan forces in March 2011," Kuperman writes, "Syria's uprising was mainly nonviolent and its government's response — although criminally disproportionate — was relatively circumscribed.But after Gadhafi’s fall, "in the summer of 2011, Syria's uprising turned violent," with "a fifteenfold increase in the killing rate" by 2013.

There’s an unhealthy dose of '80s nostalgia in the media reaction to the emerging Vladimir Putin-brokered settlement of the Syrian chemical weapons attack crisis.

The punditocracy seems transfixed on Cold-War era concerns like, "Have the Russians made our president look weak?" But there's a more important takeaway from last week's events.

The "Obama Doctrine" — or at least that part of the president's muddled foreign policy philosophy that favors humanitarian "wars of choice" — is finished. "Tomahawk humanitarianism" has had its day. The Libyan precedent won't be repeated — and it's a good thing, too.

New York Times columnist and armed international niceness advocate Nick Kristof called the 2011 air war in Libya one of "President Obama's finest moments in foreign policy." It was anything but.

Put aside the fact that the war was illegal by Obama's own terms, expressed on the campaign trail in 2007, since it "unilaterally authorize[d] a military attack in a situation that [did] not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Our allegedly limited "kinetic military action" in Libya — which lasted some seven months — was also a disaster in humanitarian terms.

As political scientist Alan J. Kuperman recently explained, NATO intervention "increased the duration of Libya's civil war by about six times and its death toll by at least seven times, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors."

In a new article in the journal International Security, Kuperman tallies up the meager benefits and considerable costs: "Human rights conditions in post-intervention Libya," which according to Human Rights Watch include abuses "'so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity,' are considerably worse than in the decade preceding the war."

The Washington Post's recent look at Libya two years after the revolution describes a hellscape "governed" by hundreds of armed militias, where "even minor disputes escalate into frequent gun violence on the streets."

But with oil production nearly shut down — 250,000 barrels a day, down from 1.6 million just before the war — at least you can't accuse Obama of spilling "blood for oil."

Meanwhile, thousands of portable surface-to-air missiles, useful for shooting down civilian aircraft, have been "privatized," with some possibly in the hands of terrorists.

Outside Libya's borders, Kuperman notes, "the most obvious negative impact has been in Mali," where Tuareg soldiers with Moammar Gadhafi’s former security forces fled with their weapons and sparked an insurgency in the country’s north.

"Making matters worse, the rebellion in the north was quickly hijacked by local Islamist forces and elements of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," leading to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians and making northern Mali by late 2012 "the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world."

Heckuva job, Barry.

Perversely, the president's Libyan adventure may have had the unintended consequence of exacerbating violence in Syria. That's because of what Kuperman calls "the moral hazard of humanitarian intervention," in which hopes for outside aid encourage risk-seeking behavior by those expecting rescue.

"When NATO started bombing Libyan forces in March 2011," Kuperman writes, "Syria's uprising was mainly nonviolent and its government's response — although criminally disproportionate — was relatively circumscribed.
But after Gadhafi's fall, "in the summer of 2011, Syria's uprising turned violent," with "a fifteenfold increase in the killing rate" by 2013.

If Libya is "a 'model intervention,'" Kuperman sums up, "then it is a model of failure."

It's unlikely that Obama has learned the right lessons from that debacle. But the good news is it's a failure that seems unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.

They are not done yet. The Neocon/Israeli wet dream is to eliminate Iran:

By: Patrick J. Buchanan 9/17/2013 06:00 AM

This summer produced a triumph of American patriotism.

A grassroots coalition arose to demand Congress veto any war on Syria. Congress got the message and was ready to vote no to war, when President Obama seized upon Vladimir Putin’s offer to work together to disarm Syria of chemical weapons.

The war America did not want — did not come.

Lindsey Graham is determined that this does not happen again.

The next war he and his collaborators are planning, the big one, the war on Iran, will not be blocked the same way.

How does Graham propose to do this?

He plans to introduce a use-of-force resolution, a peacetime declaration of war on Iran, to ensure Obama need not come back to Congress — and can attack Iran at will. Lindsay intends a preemptive surrender of Congress’ constitutional war-making power — to Obama.

He wants to give Obama a blank check for war on Iran, then stampede Obama into starting the war.

On Fox’s “Huckabee” Sunday, Lindsey laid out his scheme:

“I’m going to get a bipartisan coalition together. We’re going to put together a use-of-force resolution, allowing our country to use military force … to stop the Iranian nuclear program. … I’m going to need your help, Mike, and the help of Americans and friends of Israel.”

In July, Graham told a cheering conference of Christians United for Israel: “If nothing changes in Iran, come September, October, I will present a resolution that will authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.”

That Graham is braying that he intends to give Obama a blank check for war on Iran is not all bad news. For he thus concedes Obama does not now have the authority to attack Iran.

And by equating Iran’s “nuclear program” with a “nuclear bomb” program, Graham reveals that his bottom line is not Obama’s bottom line, but Benjamin Netanyahu’s.

Obama has said only that Iran must not be allowed to build a bomb. Bibi says Iran must not have a nuclear program.

Yet, make no mistake. The goal of Graham, the neocons, Israel and Saudi Arabia is not a negotiated solution permitting a peaceful nuclear program in Iran. The goal is a U.S. war to smash Iran.

On Nov. 10, 2010, Graham let it all out: “Instead of a surgical strike on their nuclear infrastructure, I think we’re to the point now that you have to really neuter the regime’s ability to wage war against us and our allies. … [We must] destroy the ability of the regime to strike back.”

Graham wants us to do to Iran what President Bush II did to Iraq.

But there are obstacles in our warlord’s path.

First, there is no conclusive proof Iran has decided to build a bomb.

Twice, the U.S. intelligence community, in 2007 and 2011, has asserted with high confidence that Iran has made no such decision.

Senators who do not seek a new war with Iran should call James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, to testify publicly as to whether Iran is “racing” toward a bomb. Or is this the usual War Party propaganda?

As of today, Iran has not tested a bomb and, to our knowledge, does not possess any uranium enriched to the 90 percent necessary to build a bomb. Indeed, Iran has just announced that half its supply of 20 percent-enriched uranium has been converted to fuel rods.

Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, was elected on a pledge to get U.S. sanctions lifted and to end Iran’s isolation. But to accomplish this, he must prove that Iran has no active bomb program and that he is willing to allowing intrusive inspections to prove it.

As a first step to negotiations, Rouhani just appointed the most pro-American foreign minister in four decades.

Moreover, Iran, victim of the worst poison gas attack since Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, launched by Saddam Hussein with U.S. knowledge, has condemned any Syrian use of chemical weapons and signed the agreement banning them as well the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Ayatollah has issued a fatwa against an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Often, the interests of adversaries coincide. In World War II, with Hitler as the enemy, the monster Stalin becomes an ally.

Putin wants no U.S. war on Syria or Iran. This requires no chemical weapons use in Syria and no nukes in Iran. This coincides with U.S. interests, if not Lindsey Graham’s.

The Russians, with ties to Tehran and Damascus we do not have, can be helpful in keeping us out of wars we do not want.

The true friends of America are those seeking to keep us out of wars, not those maneuvering us in.

That Vladimir Putin is going to Tehran, and Obama to the U.N. to meet Rouhani is good news.

Better news would be that Congressional anti-interventionists were meeting Graham’s war resolution with one of their own, reaffirming that, as of today, Obama has no authority to launch any preemptive or presidential war on Iran.-----

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

It has diverted billions and billions of dollars towards a nuclear program all the while being the 4th oil richest state in the world.

Th so called moderate new leader of Iran is nothing but a moderate. He wants to in moderation murder every man woman and child that lives in the state of Israel, a nation who he is incapable of calling "Israel".

"A struggle session was a form of public humiliation used by the Communist Party of China in the Mao Zedong era to shape public opinion and to humiliate, persecute, and/or execute political rivals and class enemies. In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit to various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until he or she confessed."

I loved it when the Obama-Holder-Trumpka guys beat up that Black Guy in the wheelchair.

Quirk is the pro of cons and frankly a man of too few convictions, Teresita at times has been both pro and con, Rufus is just plain contrary, and you all deserve a few convictions......but Neo-Cons are lacking because no one can say what one is......

Lord, you are dense. Only a moron would conflate a conservative with a neocon. Only an idiot would think a neocon was looking for small government. Only a dumb shit like you would waste our time with rhetorical questions.

If you want to know what a neocon is, their history, how they evolved, who they are, it's as simple as looking it up in Wiki. Why should we have to waste our time having to explain it to some hick from Idaho who spends his time reading poetry and having wet dreams?

1. Neoconservative. Criminally insane spenders that believe in killing brown people for the new world order. Huge Orwellian government, unfathomable amounts of spending, bomb tens of thousands of people to death to rearrange the globe. Take the worst aspects of the liberal and conservative positions and combine them into one and you would have a NeoCon.

John McGowan, professor of humanities at the University of North Carolina, states, after an extensive review of neoconservative literature and theory, that neoconservatives are attempting to build an American Empire, seen as successor to the British Empire, its goal being to perpetuate a Pax Americana. As imperialism is largely considered unacceptable by the American media, neoconservatives do not articulate their ideas and goals in a frank manner in public discourse. McGowan states,[69]

Frank neoconservatives like Robert Kaplan and Niall Ferguson recognize that they are proposing imperialism as the alternative to liberal internationalism. Yet both Kaplan and Ferguson also understand that imperialism runs so counter to American's liberal tradition that it must... remain a foreign policy that dare not speak its name... While Ferguson, the Brit, laments that Americans cannot just openly shoulder the white man's burden, Kaplan the American, tells us that "only through stealth and anxious foresight" can the United States continue to pursue the "imperial reality [that] already dominates our foreign policy", but must be disavowed in light of "our anti-imperial traditions, and... the fact that imperialism is delegitimized in public discourse"... The Bush administration, justifying all of its actions by an appeal to "national security", has kept as many of those actions as it can secret and has scorned all limitations to executive power by other branches of government or international law.

There may be a little vitriol in the following assessment but the author offers us his thoughts on the difference between a conservative and a neoconservative. I would question at least one of these [marked in bold] and maybe one other but for the most part he is correct.

Traditional Conservative vs. Neoconservative

A traditional conservative is for limited government: "That government is best that governs least." Under the neoconservatives, there has been the greatest increase in the size of the federal government and expansion of its regulatory power in the history of the nation.

A traditional conservative is in favor of states’ rights and against the intrusion of the federal government into individual and private affairs. Contrary to this, the neoconservatives are the first to go running to the federal courts the minute things don’t go their way; and it is they who have enacted legislation in the name of patriotism that represents the most invasive and pervasive intrusion upon our civil rights and individual liberties.

A traditional conservative is for a strong national defense as the first order of the federal government. The neoconservatives, however, have actually proposed the most drastic reduction of the nation’s armed forces and dismantling of our military bases and installations since the end of the last world war, while wasting tax revenues on phony defense contracts. Indeed, their motto is: Military appropriations are spendable, military personnel are expendable.

A traditional conservative is for a balanced budget. Under the neoconservatives, we have gone from surpluses to the largest deficits in our history. The greatest thing that America leads the world in now is the amount of the national debt. It will not be long before control of our national economy will be held by China.

A traditional conservative is for religious freedom as guaranteed by the Constitution under the Bill of Rights. The neoconservatives, however, would turn the Constitution upside down and substitute religious dogma for our government of laws. "Jesus is Lord!" they shout. But whose religion will prevail, as history has shown, can only be determined by religious wars, followed by religious persecution. Our founding fathers, whose names the Neoconservatives now take in vain, sought to insure religious freedom through the separation of church and state.

A traditional conservative is against engaging in foreign entanglements. Our citizens should not be sacrificed on foreign shores but in defense of the nation from attack by our enemies. Nor do the arguments for globalization require that America be engaged in foreign wars. Yet the neoconservatives have done just that. Worse, they are preemptive wars; wars that are being waged for the sake of private and not the national interests.

A traditional conservative would "conserve" our natural resources for all the people. The neoconservative would "reform" conservation to mean exploitation of the nation’s resources for private business interests. Under the stewardship of the neoconservatives, much of the great wealth of the nation has been squandered.

The neoconservatives are not conservatives at all - they are exactly the opposite. They share none of the traditional conservative values they purport to represent, and practice none of its principles. They are, in truth, subversives who want to undermine the Constitution and destroy our democratic institutions. They try to hide behind morals and values they do not share. They have nothing to offer but vicious selfishness, rapacious greed and callous meanspiritedness.

As the nation debates Syrian gas attacks, here's how to hash out America’s new, proper role in the worldBY MICHAEL LIND

As the controversy over possible U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war reminds us, we Americans often talk past each other when we debate U.S. foreign policy. In the words of the ’60s saying, “The issue is not the issue.” Whatever the ostensible issue may be — in this case, the idea of punitive airstrikes to punish, but not topple, the Syrian regime — the heat and passion of foreign policy debates is usually explained by the existence of other, larger conflicts over American values and strategy in the world.

To be specific, there are three perennial debates in American foreign policy — over the legitimacy of military force, the rules of world order, and power politics. If you are a consistent thinker, then the position you take on these broad foreign policy issues tends to predict the position you will take in any particular controversy.

The legitimacy of military force. Views on when the U.S. can legitimately use military force to further foreign policy objectives can be ranged on a spectrum from pacifists to militarists. Pacifists believe that war as such is illegitimate. At the other end of the spectrum, militarists revel in war and believe it to be the chief purpose of the state and the highest form of human flourishing. Most Americans fall somewhere on the spectrum between the pacifist and militarist extremes.

As I pointed out in a 1999 Foreign Affairs essay, “Civil War by Other Means,” the attitudes of Americans toward the state’s use of military violence is heavily influenced by subcultural factors. The most enduring of these are regional subcultures. Americans in the regions shaped in the 19th century by the migration of descendants of New England Puritans, from New England to the Great Lakes to the West Coast, are much more likely to oppose foreign wars than white Southerners. No matter what war is being debated, opposition is likely to be concentrated in New England while support is strongest in the former Confederacy.

According to historians like David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed and sociologists and anthropologists who have studied North-South differences, these regional attitudes toward war are embedded in regional attitudes toward violence in general. Southerners are more likely to support foreign wars and join the military; they are also more likely to kill each other over honor-related disputes. Americans influenced by New England Yankee and Quaker cultures (who need not be white or Protestant themselves) are more inclined to seek peaceable resolutions than Southerners who inherit Cavalier traditions of aristocratic militarism or Scots-Irish pugnacity. These deep cultural divides make it difficult for Americans to separate debates about particular wars or interventions from their own deeply held feelings about war as such.

The rules of world order. Another set of debates about American foreign policy has to do with the rules of world order. Here the differences are much smaller. Few Americans supported the fascist ideal of the division of the world among militaristic slave empires, and communism never appealed to Americans outside of a small minority that dwindled over time as the repressive nature of Marxist-Leninist regimes became manifest.

Most Americans support a world order based on the principles of liberal internationalism, such as the idea of universal human rights, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism and the self-determination of nations with governments accountable to their people. Within this liberal internationalist consensus, however, there are disagreements.

The chief divide, when it comes to the rules of world order, separates elite Americans from working-class populists. Populists put much more emphasis on the self-determination of nations, including the U.S., when it comes to controlling adverse effects of trade and immigration, than do members of the foreign policy elite, who sometimes see themselves as “citizens of the world” first and Americans second. While most Americans believe in the right of other nations to throw off tyranny, according to consistent polls elite Americans are much more willing than the majority of their fellow citizens to spend American blood and American treasure to help them do so.

Mr Lind's ...The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States....

Too often, these challenges have proven impervious to conventional party politics and incremental proposals.

The first question that leaps to mind is: Why a New America? Why do they want to rid us of the Old America? Sounds an awful lot like President Barack Obama wanting to “fundamentally transform” the Old Girl.

NAF elaborates:The foundation's mission is animated by the American ideal that each generation will live better than the last. That ideal is today under strain.

Our education and health care systems are struggling with problems of quality, cost and access. The country requires creative means to address its fiscal challenges and pay for needed public, social and environmental investments.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told NBC News on Wednesday that the country will never develop nuclear weapons and that he has the clout to make a deal with the West on the disputed atomic program.

“In its nuclear program, this government enters with full power and has complete authority,” Rouhani told Ann Curry, NBC News national and international correspondent and anchor at large, in his first interview with a U.S. news outlet since his election.

“The problem won't be from our side,” he said at the presidential compound in Tehran. “We have sufficient political latitude to solve this problem.”

Asked whether Iran would ever build a nuclear weapon, Rouhani noted that the country has repeatedly pledged that “under no circumstances would we seek any weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, nor will we ever.”

“We have never pursued or sought a nuclear bomb, and we are not going to do so,” he said. “We solely are looking for peaceful nuclear technology.”

Rouhani's comments are the latest in a slew of signs that he is cautiously open to defrosting relations with the U.S., which were in deep freeze under the isolating leadership of his predecessor, the inflammatory Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

He and President Obama have exchanged letters in which they traded views on “some issues.”

"From my point of view, the tone of the letter was positive and constructive," Rouhani said of the note he got from the White House congratulating him on his June election, in which he defeated five hard-liners.

"It could be subtle and tiny steps for a very important future. I believe the leaders in all countries could think in their national interest and . . . . . . .

It gets worse and worse for the cowards of the world to scared to confront an insane islamic rouge nation that supports and trains some of the vilest, most violent terrorists on the planet. That also butchers it's own peaceful citizens that simply protest against the government.

Well, that was surprising. The Federal Reserve concluded its policy-setting meeting on Wednesday, and decided against tapering QE3 at all, a move that took the markets off-guard and sparked a wild rally that saw the Dow and S&P 500 leap to fresh all-time highs.

...

Ben Bernanke won’t be the only central banker in the mix Thursday; here in Asia, traders will also be listening to remarks from Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, who is set to speak at a securities industry conference in Tokyo.

Kuroda has been a vocal advocate of raising Japan’s 5% sales tax to combat the government’s lofty debt, an issue that has proven divisive in Japan. Some in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration are reluctant to proceed with the tax increase, fearing it will weaken the economy significantly and erase strides made with Japan’s monetary and fiscal stimulus.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.